The Tech Side of Animation at Guerrilla

In this talk, I’d like to give you an overview of the shadowy (and at times slightly messy) side of animation and cinematics production in games like Killzone and Horizon.

Developing the Characters and Animation Style for DreamWorks’ Trolls

In terms of art, the pixel is the equivalent of the atom. It’s indivisible, the smallest visual unit. One pixel can be the basis of a digital masterpiece. This session will provide a closer look at “Pixel-art” a digital art form that forces you to think reductive and find interesting solutions in given limitations of size or color.

Will walk through the process of designing, modeling, rigging an animating the characters from Trolls. Will show a lot inspirational clips, early animation tests as well as final footage from the film.

From Pixel to Person

In terms of art, the pixel is the equivalent of the atom. It’s indivisible, the smallest visual unit. One pixel can be the basis of a digital masterpiece. This session will provide a closer look at “Pixel-art” a digital art form that forces you to think reductive and find interesting solutions in given limitations of size or color.

This is a live-demo/workshop that will introduce listeners to the basics of creating pixel art from an idea to a finished pixel-art game sprite.
Stefan will show various pixel-art techniques and examples of how very little can convey a whole lot as he creates a character in under 100x100px.

CityEngine 2016: The Future of 3D City Modeling

Esri CityEngine is a procedural modeling tool for creating 3D cities in feature films, commercials or TV productions. In this workshop we will present how CityEngine can be successfully integrated into pre- and post-production pipelines for the efficient design and streamlined modeling of 3D city backgrounds and digital sets.

Building a VR Roller Coaster using Unreal Engine 4

In this talk Matthias will explain the challenges he had to face and the lessons he learned during the development of the virtual reality roller coaster, accomplished with Unreal Engine 4. He will talk about which tools he used for building the experience and what was necessary for creating an enjoyable ride for virtual reality. A segment of the talk will focus on optimization to achieve the best possible performance for virtual reality.

How we got Lost in the Garden

A brief history how we bootstraped a small indiestudio from scratch. Including how we decided on our platform on consoles and how we got the funding to bring our first project to life.

Virtual Reality Game Development

Virtual Reality transforms game development tremendously. Long trained design rules do not apply anymore. Iteration is more important than ever. Expect no help from the internet because most of the time you are the first one attempting to solve this problem.

In this lecture you will not be bothered with generic do’s or don’ts. Instead you’ll hear about the specific challenges Black Cell had to face in business- as well as game-development regarding Virtual Reality during the first few months of the companies’ lifetime.

Captivating the Mind

How we can inspire the next generation through VR and AR content and the importance of entertainment based narrative-led content to engage the young mind. Disucssing how it can be utilised as an educational tool for the younger generations and push beyond the boundaries on how we view education.

Creating a Central European City in Unity3d

In this talk Alexander Grenus will explain how stillalive studios created a central european city in Unity3d for Bus Simulator 16. The talk covers the whole creation process from the concept phase to the production to the finished product. He will point out the various different artistic and technical challenges and how they managed to overcome them. He will also talk about the learnings and what you should watch out for when creating a city.

The World of Zootropolis

The world of “Zootopia” is a vast, multi-scale, multi-climate city that represents the biomes of the tundra, desert, rainforest, and grasslands. It is also a place where humans never existed and animals have evolved to be anthropomorphic. Walt Disney Animation Studios was challenged to push the artistic boundaries of all aspects of our production process to create vastly different environments. The scale difference of the animals, from a mouse to giraffe (95:1), required us to design and build a world that could be inhabited by characters of all shapes and sizes. This presentation will touch on the artistic and technical breakthroughs required to develop, create, animate, and render the world of “Zootopia” from the Rainforest to Little Rodentia.

Bulgarian Village – from Concept to VR

Chaos Group’s CG Specialist team conceived Bulgarian Village as a teambuilding exercise and as a test of the boundaries of V-Ray altogether. Days into execution and the project had already evolved into a full-scale story, which took our artist on a journey through concepting, character and story-building, world creating and the whole nine yards of visual storytelling.

Join Lyudmil Vanev as he tells the whole experience behind creating this concept piece, which promises to lay the foundations to a whole new range of V-Ray presentations. And while at it – learn how you can transform even a bizarre cartoonish environment into a unique VR experience.

Design changing shape – a story world across multiple media

Developed as a short film project at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, “Globosome” took on a life of it’s own. The award winning short film spawned an iOS game, served as a Trailer for the FMX conference and was recently the basis for a graphics research project in San Francisco. The talk examines how visual design had to change across multiple media and presents a novel method for interactive cinematic experiences based on precomputation.

Making of “Seed”

3D scanning techniques have started to increasingly influence computer animation recently. The “Seed” movie, is a visual experiment that makes heavy use of scanned data to create a surreal experience. Samples from the ordinary world, that surrounds us, are put into a new and artificial context. The contrasting relationship between formerly unrelated objects encourages the spectator to create an individual interpretation. In this talk Manuel sheds light on the creative and technical process behind the “Seed” project.

Creating stylized models with Character for Animation.

Starting with why stylized models are a fun and easy way to get across your message I will then lead my talk onto my approach of developing ideas. What workflow I find suits me best – the pros and cons of this workflow too.

From there I’ll move on to what inspires my work. What resources I use to create my artwork. Finally I’ll talk about my approach to modelling in CINEMA 4D and how I used the tools in C4D to create stylized models.

Independence Day: Resurgence – Designing the Alien Invasion

What started with a greenlight presentation painting for the ‘moon tug’, the little, heroic ‘space forklift’ from ‘Independence Day: Resurgence’ became a full blown production design gig for the Viennese design company WIDESHOT, including amongst others the whole fleet of human and alien spaceships, the look of the Earthly metropolises after the Alien Invasion in ’96, the title sequence, storyboards and eventually the planning and building of a number of sets on the production sites in Albuquerque and Los Angeles.
The talk emcompasses how a Viennese design studio came to work for large US productions and outlines the process, the background and the production phase of the design work on the samples of three selected space ships from ‘Independence Day: Resurgence’.

The maths behind the curtain

Computer-generated visual effects rely on sophisticated mathematics. In this talk, I will present three case studies where beautiful mathematics were implemented in production software to make beautiful movies. May contain traces of equations.